Learning to learn better: Lessons from a Gen-Z kid’s decade long experience with online learning
It seems like yesterday; I was sitting in front of my computer and I googled “How to”, and one of the autocomplete options was, “How to create a website” and out of curiosity, I clicked on it and there started my online learning journey. It is hard to accept that this happened almost a decade ago when I was just eleven years old. I’ve told this story of how I began this online learning journey a thousand times to people largely because of the profound impact it had on me.
Just think about this. A kid in a small city in India, who was born a year before the start of the millennium, looking at his computer at the age of 11 and watching lectures about web development and game programming using lectures from top tier universities on the other side of the world like Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), University of Toronto (UofT), etc. It is not that I am this intelligent prodigy (I am far from one), but how accidentally stumbling on something onto the internet changed my trajectory in my career.
There are too many lessons that I learned online. Not just technical or academic knowledge, but a different vision of learning where I can explore any field in the world, gain knowledge about the same topic from different people and gain a different perspective on how different people interpret and understand the same topic.
Another important lesson is how I came to understand that education is more about access to resources than where you learn something. It is a common belief that if someone studies in the best university in the country, then it is likely that the person has the most comprehensive understanding of a field.
I don’t intend to project that the best universities aren’t needed or that they are useless. People studying in those universities have amazing advantages over students who study in mid-tier universities. And students like me rely on access to the open learning resources from those universities. But the point is that we’ve completely misunderstood why those top-tier universities are needed. In today’s world, or even 15 years ago, anyone with access to the Internet and free time can and could have accessed lectures from MIT or Harvard or CMU or UofT and learn about any field and explore them. But the difference between me, who studies in a mid-tier college and uses lectures from MIT or Harvard to learn, and those who are studying in those universities is that everyone in MIT or Harvard are accessing the same top quality resources and interacting with each other forming a brilliant peer group, while in my case I am among the very few who are into online learning during college days and hence forming the same kind of peer group is much harder.
That is where the difference lies. The average student from MIT is no different in capabilities from a student in a mid-tier college in my country. The difference is the peer group and how many people in your peer circle access top quality resources and how diverse your peer group is. This mindset is important because the whole idea of merit and how capable you are having traditionally been defined not by a person’s actual capabilities and pursuit of knowledge, but by where they studied and who they are associated with. This entire belief has been and will be broken with more people moving towards online education. This is why a privileged person like me doesn’t need an IIT or NIT.
If we form a peer group of students from the mid-tier colleges where everyone in that group has a diverse range of interests and a thirst to learn more, then let them access online resources to enhance their knowledge and learn whatever they want and then allow them to interact with each other, that peer group will be no different from the average peer group from a top-tier university like the ones I’ve already mentioned above.
Today, the online learning landscape has exploded. Platforms like Coursera, EdX, MIT OLL & OCW, Stanford Lagunita, Yale Open Learning, etc. have gained huge traction over the years and have made high-quality resources from the very best educators in the world accessible. And when I talk about learning online, it is not just about online courses on these platforms; I am also pointing to research papers from various journals or solid studies from media platforms like The Guardian or Pew Research Center
Now, those are the two most important things that I learned from a decade of experience in online learning. Well, it does feel funny to me that I am just 21 years old, but I am claiming a decade old experience in something, which is great, but also something that some people have trouble understanding. Due to the lack of peers to accompany me on my online learning journey since my high school days, a lot of my views on how to learn has evolved over the years and I have learned a lot by making mistakes in online learning.
I would like to share certain methods that I learned, mostly by experimentation, that helped me become a better learner, which in turn helped me become a better academic and an educator. And I don’t want to project that these tips are must follow or that it’ll work for everybody. I believe that we all must try whatever we can to become a better learner and you must try methods of your own. Please do share your strategies, maybe it’ll be useful for me and the other readers.
So here we go.
Have a learn-it-all mindset
The phrase learn-it-all was coined by the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella. But the idea behind it is old and I learned it mostly from a few of my cousins.
Generally, when people complete a degree or do a Postgraduate or gain decades of experience in some field, they tend to cultivate a very toxic ‘know-it-all’ mindset. This mindset would have worked back in the 90s or the 2000s, but that mindset is a very toxic one. The know-it-all mindset is when a person believes that they have reached a very level understanding of a topic that they focus more on being the expert that they think they are.
This know-it-all mindset tends to be higher among the baby-boomer generation and the generation after that (millennials, those born between the 70s and 80s). They believe that they have understood everything there is to know, which creates a mindset in them that doesn’t focus on learning new ideas and listening to others’ opinions. They tend to have conflicts with everything that doesn’t align with their views, even if new ideas and pieces of evidence point in the other directions.
Learn-it-alls on the other hand have a more open-mindset. They believe that there is so much more to learn and tend to have a strong affinity to conflict themselves and search for resources to learn more. People with a learn-it-all mindset never claim that they’ve mastered a subject and keep looking for more knowledge to consume.
This is crucial for people in my generation. The time of credentials-based mastery is over. The rate at which research and new ideas are being transmitted around the world is massive and even earning a Ph.D. isn’t going to matter unless and until you adopt a learn-it-all mindset. Your relevance in any field is going to be dependent on what you know and how equipped you are with the evolving tools of trade than the credentials you hold.
Generally, when I say this, people think that I am against university degrees. I am not.
Despite my strong affinity for online learning, I completely understand and agree that nothing beats a classroom environment for sharing ideas. I against the current style of one-way professor-to-student style of teaching, but nothing will ever replace the classroom environment. But that doesn’t mean that an university degree alone is enough and you becoming a parent or having other commitments won’t be a good excuse from not being able to continuously learn more despite the credentials you hold.
So, even if you have a Ph.D., never assume that you know it all and that your experience and credentials are enough to do well in your field. What matters is how well you evolve along with the new ideas that will have to encounter.
And the only way that we currently have to keep yourself informed is to first accept that you will never learn everything, and the only way to get closer and closer to learning everything and mastering a subject is if you keep learning until you die.
And of course, my advice to constantly keep learning is to read new academic studies from your field of interest, online courses, and video lectures from universities. I always feel amazed by the rate at which people from top universities around the world add new courses to Coursera and EdX and those who cannot afford to add structured courses to Coursera and similar platforms, upload the lectures that they give at their respective universities to YouTube. One example is how just a few weeks after COVID-19 started to spread, universities like Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and Imperial College London posted courses on Infectious Diseases Modelling, Public Health, Contact Tracing, and Pandemic preparedness in Coursera and EdX. It was amazing to watch the speed at which they were able to prepare high-quality content.
Read research papers and studies
Now, this is one of the biggest criticisms that I have of people who do online courses. People complete these courses and get their certificates, but don’t take further steps to keep themselves updated with the latest research. This is where academic papers and studies come in.
There are two important advantages that you get when you read research papers and other studies regularly, but before that, I want to clarify a misconception.
Reading academic papers isn’t that hard. It does seem scary and some papers are poorly written, but it is not because the content of that paper is of a level that cannot be understood by normal learners, but because of how journals expect people to submit their papers. The format in which people are expected to submit papers sucks.
Firstly, research papers are about whatever is cutting edge in your field. A lot of people believe that whatever is cutting edge and relevant are generally reported by the news media. That is not the case. Reading research papers regularly is the only way you can stay relevant in any field.
Initially, reading research papers might seem hard. It’ll get easier after you get used to reading a few papers. It is okay if you don’t understand everything mentioned in the study. But that issue will only exist in the first few research papers that you read. Every time you don’t understand a term used in a research paper, look for resources online to understand the concept. Most of the time, for any field or subject, online resources like MIT OCW, Khan Academy, and some really good YouTube channels are enough to understand specific concepts.
Once you get the missing links about the paper, then it’ll be easier for you to understand the paper completely. It is okay if you spend a week trying to read a research paper, it is totally fine. But don’t stay away from reading new research papers and studies.
Another recommendation from my side is that when you read studies in the news media, ensure that you follow up by reading the actual research papers that are cited in the article. It is quite hard for the news media to report important researches with complete information. And trust me, incomplete information is as bad as fake news. That is why when you learn online by reading news articles about some research study, ensure that you read the actual papers that were cited in the news article. It helps you gain a better understanding of what you’re dealing with.
Learn by teaching
Learning by teaching is something that I massively benefited from. I have my style of learning and understanding various topics. This is just one perspective of how you can view a piece of information that you gained from a lecture you watched online. But, a peer of mine who happens to be interested in the same topic will learn and understand the same content in a different way.
And a lot of times, you might have queries on the content that you consumed from a lecture online or from an online course (if you don’t have queries, then you haven’t paid enough attention to the lecture). Due to the nature of online courses, I cannot ask those queries to the professors who are giving the lecture. So, I generally go up to a peer of mine who happens to be taking the same set of lectures or learning the same topic from other resources. And they do the same when they face the same issues.
Teaching the same content to each other helps you understand how different people try to understand the same topic and generally when I am teaching something to somebody or even giving a talk somewhere when people ask some questions, it feels amazing that even though that the question that someone is asking never struck me, I did know the answer for it. It is just that I didn’t think from that perspective consciously. Teaching what you know to others helps you to be consciously aware of the various perspectives by which you can understand some topic and I cannot fully express how useful others’ questions have been in my academic research.
And I’ve come across people who haven’t been able to find people to whom they can teach a specific topic. I have faced the same issues too. That is why I write. When I write a blog post about something that I’ve learned, when I typing, I get a lot of questions that prompt me to go search for answers which then improves my understanding of the topic. Remember the learn-it -all mindset? Trying to explain what you’ve learned in some form, be it in-person teaching or writing, or even vlogging, helps you to improve your grasp on the subject.
Now, you can ask me a question. Is it fair to write or vlog about something without having mastery of the topic? It is fair if you only write about the topics that you are fairly confident about. This is where the learn-it-all mindset comes in again. When you have a learn-it-all mindset, it means that you accept that you have never mastered something. So, when you write or prepare the content for your vlog, you start asking questions on the topics that you are not confident about prompting you to search for new resources to help you understand the subject better. And always send your content to other people ask for their opinions. They might have doubts and might even have issues with some of your content and you can then discuss it with others which helps you learn better and also to express what you already know in a better way.
Never feel ashamed to express what you know. Just stay truthful about what you share and look at other resources online to clarify your doubts that arise when you are preparing content which will, in turn, enhance your grasp on the subject.
Take notes
This is something that I do when I take an online course, watch lectures, watch TED talks, read research papers, or sometimes even when I read long essays. My ‘notes’ section on my shelf has more notebooks than the books that I own.
Taking notes is something that most people want to do, but don’t do because they feel that it is time-consuming. But not taking notes about everything you learn is a big mistake.
Taking notes serves two purposes.
One, it has been scientifically proven that writing about something helps us to retain that information in a better way than just listening to a lecture or reading from a book. This is a no brainer and this old-fashioned method is very much relevant and important when learning anything.
The other purpose is to help you have something that you can refer back to quickly in case you just need to refresh your knowledge about some topic or you need to get the specifics back onto the top of your mind. Let me give an example of what I mean by that.
Every time I debate with people, I mention specifics like some statistical metric from a specific study and I also send a link to those studies to make my case. People have asked me how I can remember these and quickly refer to those resources.
The answer is simple, I take notes of everything I read. When I read a specific study, I mention the important numbers and the link to those studies using my OneNote application which is cross-platform and when I watch lectures or online courses, I take hand-written notes and index them somewhere.
This strategy helps me to remember things better because I take notes and I can also get back to the specifics when I write blog posts or when I give a talk somewhere or when I debate or discuss with other people. It helps me to refresh my knowledge now and then and sometimes when I read studies that contradict my previous knowledge, I ensure that this is reflected in my notes too. That is why I take notes of TED talks too! It has been tremendously useful and people who know me personally have a first-hand experience of how useful it has been for me.
Stay open towards what you learn
Again, one more place where my personal experience with my learning journey and my peers’ online learning journey will be mentioned here. There are two ways by which I helped diversify my interests and started loving a subject that I once used to loathe.
I was never a fan of Mathematics and Biology. I tried to avoid them as much as I can.
But I was a huge fan of programming. When I completed high school, I was looking for some random online course to start learning something new. I stumbled into an introductory Computer Science (CS) course called CS50 on EdX by Harvard University. I enrolled in it out of boredom and a guest lecture in that course was about how a simple formula that is used to calculate the distance between two points known as the Euclidean Formula was used to do something in Computer Vision (Image processing). My passion for programming now intersected with Mathematics through a field in CS known as Computer Vision.
Suddenly an interest for learning more about that intersection between mathematics and CS grew in me and then I started watching MIT 18.06, a lecture series from MIT on Linear Algebra and Grant Sanderson’s Calculus courses because I learned that those two branches of Mathematics form the base of modern Image Processing algorithms. These concepts can be programmed on a computer and that is why stuff like Image compression, network streaming, recommendations on YouTube are possible. And I hoped to learn more about this in college courses, but I learned none of that during my undergraduate degree. A bulk of what we do at PhospheneAI is dependent on those two fields of Mathematics which is a stark difference from the ‘solve a hundred problems from a book’ approach in school and college.
Had I stayed away from CS50 just because it involved Mathematics, then I wouldn’t have moved past being a full stack developer.
If you don’t like some subject, try viewing other fields through the field that you love, and then you’ll be able to start working your way through to love the subjects that you once used to loathe. A peer of mine from college who wanted to be a photographer started learning Image Processing and programming so that he can make his photography tools. That intersection between photography(which he loved) and Mathematics (which he used to hate) helped him cross over multiple disciplines and allow him to do the amazing work that he is doing today.
Diversify your interests
This strategy wouldn’t be possible without open learning platforms available online.
Sometimes when I am not sure about which course to enroll with, I just try enrolling myself into a random course on Coursera or EdX. This is how I understood that my interests lie in a very diverse spectrum. I’ve taken courses on economics, climate change, quantum physics, social studies, computational neuroscience, and more recently on biology. These are fields that I either wasn’t interested in much or I loathed. But randomly enrolling in these courses and gained interest in. Of course, there are fields like Digital Signal Processing and Chemistry that I once enrolled in and didn’t like much, but it is okay. It is okay if you enroll in certain courses while exploring and then dropping out of them. It is a part of exploring various subjects.
There are certain biology-related courses that I enrolled in two years ago and dropped out of. I genuinely thought that I’ll never be able to complete Biology courses, but then recently this year I enrolled in “MIT 7.00x: Introduction to Biology: The secret of life” and largely because of how Professor Eric Landor taught biology and the passion he had while teaching, I started gaining interest in this field. So sometimes it is not that you cannot gain interest in the field, it is just that you tried learning it from the resources that don’t suit you. Now I am currently enrolled in a few Bioinformatics courses and I absolutely love them.
And btw, Eric Landor, one of the most authoritative voices in Genomics, did a PhD in Mathematics and then accidentally stumbled on Genomics and only then did he start learning Biology. Another example of how open access learning online can help people diversify their interests.
And I frequently enroll in these courses that don’t relate to the field that I am currently working in. These are completely random. Anyone can gain interest in any field or subject; you just need the patience to look at various resources and it is totally fine if you drop out of courses because you were unable to gain interest in that field. The only thing that matters is if you are exploring more and more.
Form a study group among your peers
This is one of the best and most underrated methods according to me and it worked pretty well for me and my peers. When I joined college, I understood that many people had no interest in what they are majoring in, but I was able to understand the unique talents that everyone had. Of course, they had to complete the college degree just for the sake of it, but that doesn’t mean that they needn’t learn what it takes to make a career out of what they love.
And not so surprisingly, the resources that were required for them to do enhance their potential were available online. I introduced these platforms to a few of my peers and slowly they started adopting the learn-it-all mindset, and they slowly introduced these platforms to others and we started sharing whatever we learned (it was a very diverse crowd with diverse interests), sometimes if a few of us happened to be enrolled in the same course, we shared different perspectives. This allowed us to understand how different people interpret and comprehend the same topic even though the content is the same.
Learning is great, but learning together with people is even better. And trust me when I say this, if it seems like your peers aren’t interested in academics or even learning, try discussing the field that they love and point to resources that help advance their knowledge about that field and see suddenly they become addicted to learning.
So, yes. Don’t hesitate from forming study groups, especially for online learning. It helps you and your peers grow together and you can get varying perspectives about various or the same content, which will help you and your peers enormously.
Keep Learning
This is something that people will find unrealistic. Our previous generation never had to live in a world where the amount of information that my generation consumes in one week is the same amount of information that people from my dad’s or mom’s generation or even the ones born between the 80s and 90s consumed in one year. I am not implying that they are less capable, but that we are living in a much different world. The generation and information gap that they had/have with their parents is much lesser than the gap between me and my parents. That’s how drastically the world has evolved.
Now, for people in my generation, to be able to stay informed, reading the news through apps like InShorts alone won’t be enough to stay relevant. For a person like me who grew up with a curiosity about everything other than other people’s lives, online learning is quite easy. But if I wasn’t introduced to learning online at a very very young age, even I would have struggled. But I saw in my peers that the habit of learning new things can be cultivated and in fact a lot of them who hated learning continuously are now learning at a much faster rate than I do through online courses, journals, TED talks, etc.
And this process will have to continue even during our 30s or 40s or maybe even the 50s. I intend to stay enrolled in at least one online course at any point in time throughout my life. It is going to be hard because we are the first generation that are introduced to this environment and hence, we won’t have a blueprint to how we can stay learning and exploring throughout our lives.
But learning is fun and I’ve already mentioned multiple times how we can make learning various subjects fun by looking at them from different perspectives.
That’s it, I guess. You can look at other tips from other people’s posts here on medium, but I only mentioned the ones that weren’t mentioned in other posts that I’ve read. Hope you found it useful and do share the strategies that helped you become a better learner and I will try them too. Sharing is very important in learning.
